One of the traits that the radical right and its propaganda sources generally show is bad faith or ill-will. There is little to no good faith in any of it because it is a matter of all out war. A NBC News article about the defamation lawsuit against Faux. This illustrates the bad faith that dominates the thinking and rhetoric of America's anti-democracy, authoritarian radical right:
In a loss for Fox News, judge allows Dominion'sdefamation case to go to trialFox News had argued that the challenged comments were opinion and protected as such, but Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis disagreed.
“The Court finds, as a matter of law, that the Statements are either fact or mixed opinion,” he wrote. “The Statements were capable of being proven true, and in fact the evidence that would prove the Statements was discussed many times (but never presented).”
He also knocked Fox's "neutral reporting" claim, finding “the evidence does not support that FNN conducted good-faith, disinterested reporting.”
“FNN’s failure to reveal extensive contradicting evidence from the public sphere and Dominion itself indicates its reporting was not disinterested,” the judge wrote.
“Courts have frequently recognized that rhetorical hyperbole and exaggeration is common on opinion shows,” especially those “normally associated with politics and public discourse in the United States,” the company said in a filing last month.
Dominion countered that “Fox is trying to conflate telling the truth with knowingly spreading a lie.”
It isn't just Faux that engages in bad faith discourse. The entire radical right wealth and power movement is dominated by bad faith and ill will. Both CN and BKC elites (Christian nationalist and brass knuckles capitalist) routinely engage the public in bad faith. They rely heavily on this mindset and associated tactics because nearly all dark free speech is legal** and it is surprisingly effective.
** The Dominion defamation lawsuit against Faux is a rare example of allegedly illegal DFS. But even now Faux can still win, which would make its colossal slanders legal.
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It was pointed out to me by Larry Motuz that the Discovery Doctrine (DD) of the Catholic Church was used in American law. That surprised me. It turns out that the DD was used to at least partly legally justify the attempted genocide, abuse and theft of native American Indians way back in the 1800s. Wikipedia describes the origin of the DD in American law like this:
The discovery doctrine, or doctrine of discovery, is a disputed interpretation of international law during the Age of Discovery, introduced into United States municipal law by the US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823). In Marshall's formulation of the doctrine, discovery of territory previously unknown to Europeans gave the discovering nation title to that territory against all other European nations, and this title could be perfected by possession.
A search on this turned up a document about this the United Nations commissioned in 2009. This evil, socialist wokeness is something the radical right needs to rise up, condemn, vilify and Whitewash real quick. The UN document comments:
This preliminary study establishes that the Doctrine of Discovery has been institutionalized in law and policy, on national and international levels, and lies at the root of the violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights, both individual and collective. This has resulted in State claims to and the mass appropriation of the lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples. Both the Doctrine of Discovery and a holistic structure that we term the Framework of Dominance have resulted in centuries of virtually unlimited resource extraction from the traditional territories of indigenous peoples. This, in turn, has resulted in the dispossession and impoverishment of indigenous peoples, and the host of problems that they face today on a daily basis.
Given that United States of America federal Indian law is most accessible to the Special Rapporteur, and because it serves as an ideal example of the application of the Doctrine of Discovery to indigenous peoples, this preliminary study provides a detailed examination of the premise of that system as found in the United States Supreme Court ruling Johnson’s Lessee v. McIntosh. Evidence is then provided demonstrating that the Doctrine of Discovery continues to be treated as valid by the United States Government.
In the mid-twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed and embraced the Doctrine of Discovery. .... the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision in Tee-Hit-Ton Indians v. The United States. The case had to do with the Tee-Hit-Ton people whose language is Tlingit, and whose “customs, laws, and traditions [are] similar to other Tlingit peoples” in what is now called Alaska.49 .... On 20 August 1951, the United States Forest Service sold Ketchikan Pulp and Paper Company “the right to all harvestable in the Tongass National Forest, estimated at 1,500,000 cubic feet”. Shortly thereafter, the Tee-Hit-Ton sued, arguing that they “were the sole owners of the land and water in dispute; that they had never sold or conveyed the land to any other party; and they asked for a judgment for the losses and damages from the Tongass taking, plus interest”.
Eventually, United States government attorneys filed a brief with the Supreme Court that was based in part on the Doctrine of Discovery and the era of the Vatican papal bulls; in it they argued that it was a well-recognized principle in international law that “the lands of heathens and infidels” were open to acquisition (taking) by “Christian nations”.
The US Supreme Court decided the case in 1955 against the Tee-Hit-Ton, but it avoided relying on the DD. Instead, the court held that "Congress did not intend to grant the Tribe any permanent rights to the occupied lands and therefore Government did not owe Tribe compensation for timber taken from tribal-occupied lands in Alaska under the Fifth Amendment." That argument nicely omits mention of what gave congress the right and power to grant or withhold rights in the first place. Those rights grew out of the DD.[1]
Now that's definitely some inconvenient woke history that needs to be Whitewashed real quick. Call out the Christian nationalists! Get Huckabee and DeSantis on the klaxon! Toss a nasty through the Faux News front window and hit Tucker with it! Somebody do something!! This evil socialist woke need to be killed right now!!
Footnote:
1. But wait, it's even more exciting than that. Consider this reasoning from Ruth Bader-Ginsberg in 2005:
That the Doctrine of Discovery is still being used as an active legal principle by the United States Supreme Court in the twentieth-first century is revealed in the case City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York decided in March 2005, 50 years after the Tee-Hit-Ton ruling. .... To contextualize the Court’s decision and to decide the sovereign status of the Oneida Indian Nation, the Supreme Court relied upon the Doctrine of Discovery. This is revealed in footnote number one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s decision for the Court majority: “Under the ‘Doctrine of Discovery’”, wrote Justice Ginsberg, “... fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign — first the discovering European nation and later the original states and the United States”.
Jeez, this is so inconvenient that RBG tried to bury it in a footnote. Just imagine what Tucker, DeSantis and Huckabee will do with this nasty piece of woke.
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Green burials are a thing: The WaPo writes:
Mia Zinn was a member of her middle school ecology club, had planted a reflection garden and had implored public officials to preserve a local woods, and when she became terminally ill, she wanted to become a tree. So, the day after she died, her father, Chris Zinn, visited Serenity Ridge Natural Burial Cemetery and Arboretum in Baltimore County, a 45-minute drive from the family’s home in Abingdon, Md. He was drawn to a wooded area that opened up to a wedge of western sky.
“That was the perfect spot,” he said. “It reminded me a lot of an area that we hiked many, many times near here.”
Mia died last month at 17 of Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, and became the third person interred at Serenity Ridge. The site is one of a growing number of cemeteries in the United States offering natural, or green, burials in response to demand from the environmentally conscious.
Such burials eschew the embalming, expensive caskets and concrete vaults or metal grave liners standard in U.S. cemeteries, replacing them with simple materials that decompose along with the body. Mia was laid to rest in a bamboo casket with a cotton sheath, a burial her parents said was simple and elegant and surprised some of the attendees.
“A lot of people said, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t know this was even a thing,’” said her mother, Aubrey Zinn.
Although Bixby said no state laws prohibit green burials, not all cemeteries offer them. Some local jurisdictions require cemeteries to have paved roads to gravesites or to use leakproof containers. With green burials, the earth settles during decomposition, causing the land to undulate; some cemeteries mandate vault liners to maintain a flat landscape.
“The whole idea is not to think of it as a cemetery,” Berg said. “It’s a nature preserve where people happen to be buried.”
Mia wanted to become a tree
